Heidegger

On 03/06/2006, at 9:21 PM, michaelP wrote:

> hi malcom, before going any further let me add that I did say (wrt
> to prior thinking terror) we ought to discuss what terror is
> “without merely and only” providing illustrative examples (around
> which, it seems, there is initial disagreement and disjunction
> {e.g., whether the USA is terrorising Iraqis or whether Hamas is
> terrorising Israelis, etc}; I didn’t suggest we dispense with
> examples.

Cool by me, although I may very well revert back to the historical
critique which you seem to read as “merely and only providing
illustrative examples” as for me it has been an interesting
philosophical discussion.

> I don’t exactly want to “argue” or even lay out such an “argument” (I
> have no beef yet…); rather, I should like a discussion to begin
> asking as to the essence of terror, and, of course, I should begin
> with making suggestions myself on this beginning, which, I shall, as
> soon as I have thought more…

Yes, I meant starting an argument in the sense of writing out what
you’d like to discuss, how you’d like to discuss it and what terms
you want to use and then opening it up to discussion. A philosophical
discussion of sorts, but you’re already doing that.

>> The most obvious point of reference for this discussion (to me)
>> would be Heidegger’s notion of the they-self and its fascination
>> with death, as in its constant denial of the authentic angst of
>> death, which also means of dissolution, time and of the threat of
>> the ‘other’, in constantly turning away to the distracting
>> curiosities of everyday life.
>
> This might be promising, but I cannot but note that it is exactly
> terror(ism) (amongst other nasty pleasures such as serial killers,
> disasters, etc) that has become a “distracting curiosity” (all
> those movies, news broadcasts, etc: great entertainment — but do
> the entertaining whereupons of mass distraction provide what terror
> is?)

Well some of it is obviously propaganda, some of it is badly covered
news and the rest of it seems to be entertainment, a reflection of
our dis-ease. I wouldn’t say this is terror itself either but rather
the representation of terror, which is still of course a meaningful
relation to that terror itself. So perhaps there’s the representation
of terror, a logos of terror which is not yet the revealing of terror
itself. I mean you’d have to be terrorized for a start in order to
reveal terror itself don’t you think? At least that would be my
aesthetic interpretation of the term “terror”. I’d guess a logical
extremity of that would be the kind of terror the children felt at
Haditha before they died. You know … pure terror as such.

View BBC video on Ishaqi and Haditha murders.

> Yes, but I should like to suggest that terror is other than the
> inane production of the idiot box and the newspapers, etc; if noise
> (media, common understandings, sabre rattlings of politicos, etc)
> be noise(y) then it is not terror as such unless noise itself is
> terror too… I want to think terror filtered out from the noisy
> background as some kind of signal, sign, something significant in
> its standing out precisely from the noisy nonsense of the noisome
> machinations of the media et al. As much as asking for the essence
> of terror I ask for the terrorising of essence…

Yeh, what I call different perspectives or the many senses something
can be said to be what it is. So we’ve got mass mediated terror, the
aesthesis of terror and its logos … as well as of course the
ongoing acts of actualizing terror in our world. How many more senses
can we make from the term “terror”?

Cheers,

Malcolm

***************************
Dr Malcolm Riddoch
Electronic Arts
School of Communications and Contemporary Arts
Faculty of Communications and Creative Industries
Edith Cowan University, 2 Bradford St, Mount Lawley
Perth Western Australia
+61 08 9370 6034

Posted on Saturday, June 3rd, 2006 at 3:25 pm
comment | rss 2.0 | trackback
Tags: ontology» terror»